Pros And Cons Of College Rankings

As education plays a vital role in present-day society, an increasing number of people decide to attend colleges or universities. Under people’s demand, college rankings come into the public’s horizon and affect the way of choosing colleges. With its development, numerous media and academics start running the college rankings based on many factors such as “widely accepted indicators of excellence as first-year student retention and graduation rates and the strength of the faculty” (Morse et al.). However, the controversy about college rankings has never stopped since supporters think they are helpful, while the opponents consider they make everything worse. Despite there are many harsh criticisms against college rankings, in contemporary society, …show more content…
Vedder, an adjunct scholar, points out that publishers use various factors like “academic ability”, “locational preferences” to evaluate schools which help students combine all essential information to choose the best one fitted themselves from all of them (Karaim). For instance, if a student is interested in the business program and considers educational quality as the priority, he or she can compare schools through the rankings of the business program easily instead of doing research from the beginning to the end. For International students, college rankings are helpful tools to research the schools abroad while they have little knowledges about those universities. In addition, when a student waves between two colleges, the higher ranked school can be a better choice because it contains advanced aspects which the other one does not. Bradly, a high school student, says U.S. News & World Report's “Best College” affects her to pick UC-Berkeley but the UCLA because it ranks higher (Karaim). Therefore, there is no doubt that college rankings bring conveniences to students and save their time from being irresolute on